Book Review: Talking to Strangers
15.05.2020
Book Review | Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Gladwell is one of my favourite 'smart thinkers'. I love the way that he takes a seemingly insurmountably complicated issue and breaks it down into digestible facts and figures without oversimplifying. I'm currently taking his writing workshop on Masterclass and he's nothing like I imagined - he seems nerdier and sweeter somehow than I assumed from listening to his authoritative voice on his podcast Revisionist History. But that's what he's great at though, making us rethink our shared assumptions! I listened to Talking to Strangers on audiobook mostly because I enjoy his voice but there were a few added bonuses, with snippets of actual interviews, news clippings and actors reading court transcripts which broke up the FIFTEEN HOURS OF AUDIO nicely.
The tagline of Talking to Strangers is 'What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know'. Gladwell uses a variety of examples to explore this concept, looking at cases where communication between strangers has failed and lead to problems small, large and disastrous. From differences in language to clashing cultural traditions, he looks at situations in which the true meaning of one person's speech or intent is not correctly interpreted by another.
The book begins with the fateful encounter between the Spanish Conquistador Cortez and the Aztec Ruler Montezuma back in the 16th Century. Gladwell cites it as the first time that a European visited somewhere so far afield and foreign. He explains how an initially respectful encounter between the two men ultimately became a bloody war in which 20 million Aztecs died, including Montezuma. He attributes it, as historians have previously, to a mistranslation of Montezuma's speech to Cortez. This example sets up Gladwell's thesis: that when we communicate with those who are ‘other’ from us there are a myriad of ways that we can misunderstand intent and thus misconstrue the situation.
After this opening tale, Gladwell moves onto some more recent historical examples. In this section I found I had to keep replaying sections as it was packed full of detail and backstory and I found myself wishing I had the book so I could more easily flick back and forth to remind myself of important information. Actually, once I got into the bulk of the book this wasn't such an issue. I think it's mostly because the opening is extremely political and densely detailed, following the complicated tales of Cuban spies, Chamberlain and Hitler's meetings and Fidel Castro interspersed with the results of an experiment measuring how easy it is to tell if participants were lying. The most interesting concept introduced in this section was that of "default to truth", which is to say that most of us will assume the best of people, that they're telling the truth, for as long as we possibly can. He uses this to explain why, for example, the US Intelligence Service didn't catch a spy in their midst even when she was questioned, because she came up with a reason for her strange behaviour and they were inclined to believe it. It's a really interesting idea and Gladwell imparts his belief that it's also central to society functioning. That, although it's true that people don't always tell the truth, and that there are situations in which it's important to be on the lookout for this, if people always assumed this was the case then terrible things would happen. As an example he mentioned the Sandra Bland case and pointed out that in this, and many other cases where black Americans have been killed by police, it's because the police did not default to truth, they already anticipated the worst and that had an impact on their own actions.
The sections of the book that I found most fascinating was when I could see Gladwell's theory directly applied to situations I was most aware of. I was already fascinated with the Amanda Knox case and, despite understanding that the media absolutely concocted the Foxy Knoxy persona, to some degree I still struggled to understand her odd behaviour in the run-up to the Italian trial. Gladwell combs through it again with a fine tooth comb and mostly simply discredits the majority utilising backstory I wasn't aware of. For the still inexplicable behaviour Gladwell looks at how it can be genuinely difficult for even an experienced interrogator to see past it if it's behaviour that they'd normally associate with a guilty conscience, and how this is a systematic issue within the legal system that repeatedly leads to wrongful convictions. Just because that psychological mindset or behaviour might be something an interrogator associates with guilt, for another it might be nervousness. This, I think, is an important lesson. Even within a relatively small sample group there are people who behave in different ways. For example, neurodiverse individuals might respond to a situation in a way that neurotypical people might find inappropriate, but it doesn't mean they're wrong or guilty. Humans seem to think that other people behave transparently, that we can tell if they are being truthful or if they are lying, and that it's always clear what they're thinking or feeling. (There's a fun section using an episode of Friends to illustrate this point that I'm 100% sure was even better on audiobook! _Gladwell posits however that in real life that's not the case and, for some reason, when there's a mismatch between how someone acts and how they feel, we really struggle to process that.
The other example I found most interesting in the book focused on alcohol. Gladwell, in a move that has been a tad controversial, looks at the court transcript of the Brock Turner/Chanel Miller case. Again, I knew a fair bit about this case and had just listened to Miller's story on Nora McInerney's Terrible, Thanks for Asking podcast. The focus here, as well as in exploring some similar stories, was to delve into the role that alcohol plays in affecting how strangers communicate. For those who don't know, Turner was found guilty after a passer by found him sexually assaulting an unconscious Miller and chased him off. Turner's testimony changed dramatically once he was in court and his guilt is not up for discussion in this segment. Gladwell does however question the concept of responsibility under the effects of alcohol. Citing the Myopia Theory (Steele and Josephs, 1990), Gladwell looks at the idea that alcohol narrows our emotional and mental fields of vision, leading those under the influence to only be able to access less cognitively demanding information which has a disproportionate effect on decision making. His research supports the idea that drinking within a clearly defined and safe structural set up allows the positive aspects of drinking alcohol to flourish (e.g. bonding with others, shaking off responsibilities briefly) while drinking within the hyper sexualised set-up of a fraternity party or a nightclub can be much more dangerous. It's an uncomfortable topic to broach, particularly in a time where we've moved past victim-blaming, but it does intrigue me greatly and I'd really like to research it further.
Just in writing this review I've had to listen to sections of the book again. It's an extremely dense and convoluted piece of writing and will probably take me more listens to truly unpack and understand properly. If I had a complaint it'd be that I don't think it all neatly fits under the title Talking to Strangers. There are so many different theories and some link more closely perhaps to understanding people’s motives (e.g. the section on the suicide of Sylvia Plath) while the alcohol investigation seems like a topic all of its own. The idea of default to truth doesn't apply to every single case study in the book but does have an intriguing impact on many, particularly the weighing up of looking at where we seem to expect the best and the worst of people. How guilty people that behave ‘well’ get away with things while innocent people are locked up or killed.
That said, the core concept of the book for me, is that we need to rethink how we allow our own assumptions to colour how we communicate with other people. That behaviour isn't always transparent and that sometimes a little more background information is needed before we made a judgement. Gladwell chose Janelle Monae's 2015 song Hell You Talmabout to play throughout the entire book and this helps to underscore the potential fatal outcomes of miscommunication and preconceptions in such encounters.